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WordPress

Posted by Daniel Alvarez
Daniel Alvarez
6,085 Points

WordPress plugin to handle XML remote feed.

Hello there,

I have an URL link to a sport ranking feed that I want to embed in a table inside my WordPress site. However, the feed link contains an auto-generated XML, and I was looking quite a lot for plugin that could let me handle this type of format, because It is generated from a third party and I can not modify the XML, so I need to fit my site to it. There are a few that do something similar (i.e. TablePress), but they don't work with XML files.

It seems that I need to code my own plugin for that. Could anyone please, suggest me how to start doing it and what tools and knowledge do I need?

I started to watch the videos about writing a plugin in wordpress. But I think I will need something else in addition.

Thanks in advance....

The XML looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <item>
            <title>PlayerName01</title>
            <R2_UID>49373</R2_UID>
            <city_state_country>Cd. Juarez, CH MEX</city_state_country>
            <gender>Male</gender>
            <player_image></player_image>
            <rank>1</rank>
            <ranking_points>13220</ranking_points>
            <advantage>3495</advantage>
            <events_played>11</events_played>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title>PlayerName02</title>
            <R2_UID>32507</R2_UID>
            <city_state_country>Marine, MN USA</city_state_country>
            <gender>Male</gender>
            <player_image></player_image>
            <rank>2</rank>
            <ranking_points>9725</ranking_points>
            <advantage>2145</advantage>
            <events_played>11</events_played>
        </item>
        ...
        ...
        ...
        ...
    </channel>
</rss>

1 Answer

Shane Oliver
Shane Oliver
19,977 Points
Shane Oliver
Shane Oliver
19,977 Points

PHP has a parser for XML inbuilt so you could do something like

<?php
    $xml = simplexml_load_file( 'URL of the awesome API that returns XML instead of JSON' ) or die ( 'Error: Your object was not created' );
    // add your code to extract that data from your xml object
?>
Daniel Alvarez
Daniel Alvarez
6,085 Points

You're right! I think using JSON would be a much better way to feed this kind of information to external websites, specially to embed it in a table. However, as I said, this feed is being generated from other source that I can't access or change.

How about if I threat this as a RSS feed? Do you think it will be easier that way? Although I wanted to show it inside a table, I think if I achieve to show it as a chronological feed will be fine, too.

In that case, when I use a RSS reader, how can I do to get the information inside those custom tags like: <city_state_country>, <gender>, <rank>, etc...? The regular readers are just recognising the <title> tag.

Thanks...